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Je crie, donc je suis

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Sa Majesté Louis Catorze, Le Roi Soleil, supreme ruler of Le Château, sworn enemy of canine foe and scourge of Ocado delivery drivers.

  • Morceaux cassés d’une chose

    Most pet owners will admit that they look after their animals better than they look after themselves, and I am no exception. When I visited the doctor recently about my recurrent headaches*, the consultation went something like this:

    Doctor: “For how long have you been getting these headaches?”

    Me: “I don’t know.”

    Her: “How often do you get them?”

    Me: “I don’t know.”

    Her: “How long does each one last?”

    Me: “I don’t know.”

    Her: “When was the most recent one?”

    Me: “I don’t know.”

    [Silence, tumbleweed, crickets]

    *Mum, if you are reading this, don’t worry. Everything is fine.

    Now, had these been Louis Catorze’s headaches and not mine, I would have immediately been able to say that the he’d had them every 3.4 days for the last three weeks, that they lasted 22 minutes on average and that the last one started two days ago at 8:43am.

    Last week, once again I demonstrated the extent to which we put our little sods first. After stuffing my face with salted caramel cheesecake, I decided that I wanted more cheesecake. However, when I opened the fridge, the cheesecake dish slid out and fell onto the floor.

    Scientists may well tell us that matter cannot both implode and explode at once – or, if it did, the two would cancel each other out – but clearly they have never dropped a dish of cheesecake on the kitchen floor. Because I was a couple of glasses of Crémant under, both my clean-up efforts and my judgement were pretty shambolic; after a perfunctory sweep with the dustpan and brush, I tried to salvage a couple of spoonfuls of cheesecake from the mess and only stopped when I realised I was crunching on glass**.

    **Mum, if you are reading this, don’t worry. Everything is fine.

    Cat Daddy, a few minutes later: “Did you clean up all the glass from the floor?”

    Me, aware that I probably hadn’t: “Yeah.”

    Him: “Are you sure?”

    Me, pouring myself some more Crémant: “Uh-huh.”

    Him: “I really hope so. We can’t have HIM hurting his little paws.”

    HIS LITTLE PAWS. OH. MON. DIEU.

    Before Cat Daddy could even draw breath I was scouring the floor for fragments of glass, looking at the same spots multiple times from different angles to see if I could catch them glinting. I picked up every single piece by hand, threw them away, then did another sweep with the dustpan and brush AND a further sober sweep the next morning. We have broken glass countless times in this house and Catorze has never come a cropper, but HIS LITTLE PAWS.

    Lessons learned have been as follows:

    1. The universe has ways of letting me know that one helping of cheesecake is enough.

    2. I would – and did – crawl over broken glass for Catorze. And doesn’t he look appreciative?

    Smug little sod and his weird tail.

  • La peau de chagrin (Partie 2)

    Louis Catorze’s skin problem is returning.

    The fur around his eyes is thinning, and this is the familiar, telltale sign that all could turn to merde if we aren’t careful. In fact, it could very well turn to merde even if we ARE careful. Since we don’t know what causes it, we are still at a loss as to what we’re supposed to do.

    We had a feeling that this would happen since he only had a short-acting steroid shot the last time, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating. He wasn’t allowed to have a steroid shot within two weeks of his surgery, nor too close to his Loxicom, so we have been waiting until the earliest opportunity, which was yesterday (as advised by the vet). I was stuck at work so Cat Daddy took Catorze, and the vet, who hadn’t seen the little sod before, called him a “noisy boy”. TRUST US, WE KNOW.

    At least now he’s done … just in time for the full moon next week, which isn’t ideal as we could do without double the level of psycho, but Cat Daddy and I are just going to have to stock up on vodka and ride this one out.

    If you have ever had a black cat in your life, you will know that the their eyebrow area can look perfectly normal from certain angles, and almost bald from other angles, and Catorze is no exception. The two pictures below were taken by his chat-sitteur last weekend, and they look very different indeed, so it’s hard to know from taking photos whether or not he is improving. However, if he’s eating (check), drinking (check), screaming (check) and being a complete and utter pest (HELL, check), I think we can be reassured that he is fine.

    Looking a bit scruffy and threadbare here.
    Not looking too bad here.

  • Ne l’oublions pas

    Cat Daddy and I have just returned from a weekend away watching Brentford play Norwich. Louis Catorze was left in the care of a chat-sitting friend and, apart from The Curious Incident of the Bubble Wrap in the Night-Time and a LOT of creepy-staring and screaming, he was the perfect host.

    Best not to even ask.

    In somewhat related news – well, linking tenuously to football and cats – we really aren’t about to forgive Kurt Zouma anytime soon. During that first match against Wolves, when fans were booing him, I wondered if people would have the energy or the inclination to keep it up for ninety minutes. It seems that I underestimated the elephantine memory of the British public, because we’ve all managed to keep it up for a whole month.

    On Saturday West Ham played Liverpool away, and even Cat Daddy, who doesn’t like Liverpool football club, had to raise a smile at these scenes at and around Anfield:

    I will even pardon the lack of apostrophe. (Picture from worldsportstale.com.)
    Terrifying but nonetheless a flash of genius. (Picture from si.com.)

    Scousers, we applaud you. Please pass the baton to the Brummies and encourage them to do something equally brilliant when Aston Villa play West Ham at the weekend.

    It’s another month before West Ham come to Brentford, and I’m already giving serious consideration to a placard saying “Zouma, may I have your shirt (so that my cat can wipe his arse on it)?” Best of all, Catorze even knows how to say that in Zouma’s language: French.

  • L’élixir blanc

    In my last post I mentioned how easy it was to give Louis Catorze his Loxicom, since I just blobbed it onto his fur and he happily groomed it off. So, naturellement, as soon as that went live, he had to stuff it up.

    This was the tragic sequence of events that took place the other night:

    1. Prepare syringe and lay it on coffee table.

    2. Little sod comes in, drenched from the rain, and settles his gross, cold body on me.

    3. Casually reach for syringe and gently empty its contents onto right side of royal rump.

    4. No reaction from Catorze.

    5. Realise that, because he is so wet from the rain, he hasn’t noticed the additional liquid.

    6. Poke hopefully at royal rump with syringe tip, to draw his attention to area.

    7. Catorze begins sniffing air around me, realising that something is afoot but too thick to see what.

    8. Catorze exits lap and starts sniffing around living room carpet.

    9. Catorze returns to lap and settles, letting Loxicom air-dry on his body.

    10. Decide eventually to apply another dose. Message Cat Daddy to refill syringe, but request that he return it in nonchalant fashion to avoid arousing suspicion.

    11. Cat Daddy refills syringe and returns it suitably nonchalantly. Second dose applied to left side of royal rump (Catorze’s, not Cat Daddy’s).

    12. Catorze ignores second dose.

    13. Cat Daddy sits down next to us.

    14. Catorze exits lap and sits on Cat Daddy, left side down, smearing most of second dose on his jeans.

    15. Unrepeatable Expletives.

    16. Catorze flips over, FINALLY notices remains of second dose and starts to groom it off. Success!

    17. Catorze exits Cat Daddy’s lap, discovers dried-on first dose and grooms that off, too, ending up double-dosed.

    18. Vet’s words of “Too little is better than too much” ring in my ears for rest of evening.

    Mercifully he has now completed his course, so we won’t have to go through this farce again. Until the next time something goes wrong.

    Unbelievably, his body felt worse than it looked.

  • Où sont les dents?

    Louis Catorze’s follow-up with his royal physician went well.

    When I stuffed him into his transportation pod, naturellement there was the usual unearthly screaming. Yet, on the walk over to the practice, he was eerily silent. This is most unlike him. The only moment that he let out a little squeak was when we passed a couple of French bulldogs; no doubt he recognised his compatriots and was keen to bid them a friendly bonjour/m’aidez.

    Upon arrival, Catorze made a friend in the waiting room: a fellow allergic cat called Pebbles, the same age as him but twice the size, whose humans thought Catorze’s pod was my handbag until it started screaming. In fact, this is the one disadvantage of the pod. Because it doesn’t look at all like a vessel for transporting animals, I worry that people who see me on the way to the vet will think I have some bizarre screaming holdall – or, worse, that I am walking along making the noise myself.

    Bag o’screams.

    Anyway, when we went into the examination room, I confessed my monumental medication stuff-up to the vet. If she thought I was an absolute idiot, she hid it well and told me that too little was better than too much. Unbelievably, despite everything, Catorze is healing well and there is no sign of any infection. I have to continue giving the little sod his Loxicom for another five days which, luckily, is very easy since I just blob it onto his fur and he calmly and happily grooms it off. So there is no need to Greco it to him. (Grecoing a liquid is a lot harder than it sounds.) Then, after three clear drug-free days, he can go back for his steroid shot.

    When we returned to Le Château, he forgave me instantly and settled on my lap (photographed below). So it seems that the days of the Post-Vet Sulk are a thing of the past.

    Le Roi’s fangs are taking their time in coming back. Cat Daddy seems to think they are progressively returning, but I’m struggling to see it myself. Obviously we love him with or without fangs, but they are my favourite part of him and he doesn’t seem like himself without them. Let’s hope that they return fully soon.

    Thanks again to everyone who has wished him well.

    Where ARE those fangs?

  • La mise à jour du statut

    I am the worst person in the world.

    On Saturday, when giving Louis Catorze his Loxicom, it dawned on me that I hadn’t been turning the bottle upside-down to draw the liquid into the syringe. In short, the poor little sod hadn’t had any pain relief since the day after his surgery, and I had just been administering air. I hadn’t noticed because I thought I was drawing in clear liquid and, when nothing spilled when I delivered each dose, I simply thought my technique had improved.

    So there I was thinking poor Catorze wasn’t bouncing back from this surgery as quickly as he did from the last one, when, in fact, I’m just a shit cat parent. I debated for some time before posting this, in case I received a torrent of (rightful) criticism for being so negligent, but I decided in the end to take a bullet on the behalf of the greater good so that nobody else makes the same mistake in the future. CHECK THE PRODUCT, Mesdames et Messieurs, especially if it’s one you haven’t used before.

    Je suis désolée, Mon Roi. Vous méritez bien mieux que ça.

    Catorze’s swollen snout is subsiding, as is his post-surgery chain-smoking drag queen voice, but there is still little sign of his trademark fangs. Something about the swelling, or the way his jaws fit together, or possibly both, means that they are hidden from view much of the time. Even when I position the camera low down under his chin, with him staring haughtily down, I barely see the famous fangs.

    Only the tiniest hint of fang … and (I think) a bit of dribble.

    Despite being subdued, he did feel well enough to join us when Cocoa the babysit cat’s folks came for dinner, pitter-pattering between people and sitting right in the middle of us, listening to the conversation as if it somehow concerned him. And he also felt well enough to bolt out at The Front as our guests left, just at the moment that I shouted to Cat Daddy, “Don’t let him run out!”

    (Cat Daddy blamed me for not holding onto Catorze, but the real culprit was Cat Daddy’s whisky-induced slowness in closing the door.)

    Catorze has his follow-up with the vet later this morning, which will give an indication whether everything is unfolding as it should. I still haven’t decided whether or not I should confess my horrendous mistake although, since the vets follow Le Blog, they will probably know by now.

    The little sod thanks everyone who has wished him well, especially Cocoa the babysit cat and his sister Chanel who sent him a toy and some non-crunchy duck and venison treats (which he LOVES). Hilariously, Cat Daddy thought the treats were for us and I almost wish I’d just kept quiet and let him eat them.

  • Purrminateur 2: Le Dernier Jugement

    We have been thinking about a suitable punishment for Kurt Zouma for what he did to his cat.

    Ordinarily, for situations such as animal cruelty, I would be of the medieval “sharp instruments meeting with tender body parts” school of retribution but, since I’m a teacher, I’m not really allowed to say things like that. Gratuitous violence is out, and relentless ridicule will have to suffice instead.

    Cat Daddy and I weren’t able to watch West Ham’s match against Newcastle, other than a few snatched minutes in the pub with the sound off. As you may be aware, Louis Catorze happens to be a fan of Sunderland, whose local rivals are Newcastle, so under normal circumstances he wouldn’t want anything to do with them. However, the Newcastle fans turning up to the match armed with inflatable cats, and the story of Newcastle striker Chris Wood meowing at Zouma throughout, has made him warm considerably to his bitter enemies.

    Photo from dailymail.co.uk (sorry).

    Even funnier is that one of Zouma’s teammates allegedly complained to the referee about the meowing. Even my Year 9s wouldn’t have snitched to the teacher about something so pathetic and embarrassing. If it turns out to be true, however, Chris Wood will forever be my hero.

    Catorze is also a fan of the latest masterpiece by Jim’ll Paint It. If you don’t know about Jim, people brief him with imaginary scenarios – the more ridiculous, the better – which he then turns into bespoke digital art pieces. After the Zouma incident he was inundated with requests for cats exacting their revenge, and this is what he created:

    Photo from Jim’s Facebook page. For more of his work, have a look here.

    As other social media users have pointed out, it’s quite clear that the black cat on the right is the one who masterminded this, and he is now sitting back and enjoying watching his devotees do his dirty work for him. And how shocking, yet unsurprising, that he looks so much like Sa Maj. He even has his little white chest tufts.

    Tufts very much visible here on this old photo of our mutual friend.

    One day, the British public will move on from this. Today, however, is not that day.

  • Le patient est de retour

    Louis Catorze’s second, and hopefully last, dental surgery went well. He is now minus two more teeth: his last remaining lower canine and the small incisor next to it. And we are minus £435.

    The timing has turned out to be less than optimal, to say the least. We are barely out of the monetary dearth that is January AND we’ve just got back from a country where a double vodka-cola and a pint of beer cost £26 AND both our roof and our car need repairs. It’s not the best time for little sods and their private health care to kick us in the wallet, but tant pis.

    When we collected Catorze from the TW3 branch of the vet, he had just come round from the surgery and was beating the sides of his pod and trying to unzip it from inside, all the while screaming his guts out. However, after a chillingly silent car ride home, he then escaped out at The Front within minutes. So clearly all was well.

    He has a couple of dissolving stitches in his mouth (although no Cône has been prescribed, so I hope we can trust him not to mess with them), and we are to give him a dose of Loxicom every day until his next vet visit at the end of the week.

    It was hard to take a good picture at this time (the morning after he came home), with the feeble living room light struggling to illuminate him and the unsightly backdrop of our coffee table with rubbish all over it, but somehow his chin and cheeks seem to sit differently. And, sadly, his trademark fangs don’t appear to protrude as much as they did before. Hopefully, as the swelling subsides, they will realign and he will look a bit more like the Roi that we all know and love. Right now it’s almost as if they swapped him for another cat, and the only reason I know they didn’t is because nobody in their right mind would swap him in rather than out.

    Thank you for all your good wishes. We will keep you updated.

    Who the heck are you?

  • Les dents du Roi (Partie 2)

    We have survived Storm Eunice and Storm Franklin and emerged on the other side, triumphant and victorious. Our only casualty was part of the fence separating us from That Neighbour, which means Louis Catorze will now find it easier than ever to pitter-patter over there and annoy him.

    Meanwhile, Catorze’s food weirdness remains as it was after his last dental surgery.

    Every time we feed him, we are forced to choose between letting the tap run for long enough to heat the water to his satisfaction, or boiling a kettle in order to use just 15ml of the water. Cat Daddy tends to choose the former whereas I choose the latter. And, if someone else is feeding Sa Maj, we say, “Do you prefer wasting water or wasting electricity? Feel free to choose how you want to destroy the planet on his account.” In fact, when we go away and leave others in charge of him, this is exactly, word for word, what we tell our chat-sitteurs.

    The Gabapentin, which was supposed to indicate whether Catorze was in pain, hasn’t really told us much, so his dental surgery is booked for tomorrow. Ideally I would have done it much sooner in the year, but there was zero availability in January (despite me enquiring in late December), and we needed to time it to land away from his steroid shot.

    Luckily for us all, the little sod isn’t acting like a cat in pain or distress: he’s playful, noisy and loving life. Let’s hope he keeps up his high spirits through this second dental procedure, and that he won’t need any further treatment.

    Bon courage, little sod.

  • Les chats islandais

    Cat Daddy and I are back from Iceland, and we were lucky enough to land just before Storm Eunice hit. If you have never been to Iceland, I highly recommend it; it’s the most exquisite, enchanting place. I have learned that a single ten-minute mud mask at the Blue Lagoon can miraculously erase several days of vodka and poor sleep from your face. And Cat Daddy has learned not to stand too close to active geysers.

    After reading that Reykjavik’s streets were full of cats, I had hoped to get my feline fix that way during our Roi-free week. However, a huge snow blizzard hit on the day of our arrival so, as you can imagine, the cats stayed indoors. The same snow blizzard meant that we didn’t see the Northern Lights, but this gives us an excuse to go back again.

    The closest we came to any cats (Cat Daddy: “That’s not actually why we went, by the way”) was reading about a demonic cat of Icelandic legend called the Jólakötturinn, which is said to walk the earth on Christmas Eve, intent on devouring anyone who isn’t, erm, wearing new clothes. Luckily, since it’s February, we were in no danger of bumping into this beast, but we were somewhat unsettled to discover when Googling pictures of it, that most of them looked like slightly more pleasant versions of Sa Maj:

    Picture from thegreatcat.org
    Picture from news.westbranch.org.
    Picture from grapevine.is.
    Picture from Pinterest.

    Apart from one or two screaming incidents, Louis Catorze behaved very well indeed during our absence and was sweet and affectionate towards his chat-sitteurs. In fact, he didn’t even say hello to us when we came home, choosing instead to remain with one of his chat-sitteurs on her work Zoom call. He then followed her outside when she went to vape, walking straight past us.

    (Incidentally, he wasn’t sulking that we’d left him. He doesn’t care anywhere near enough to bother doing that.)

    These were the scenes at Le Château during our absence:

    Not a merde was giv’n about the departed chat parents on this fine day.
    Nor on this fine day.

  • Purrminateur: Le Soulèvement des Chats

    Cat Daddy and I are still in Iceland. News from Le Château is that Louis Catorze has latched onto the gentleman of the chat-sitting couple and won’t let him get on with his work. This will not surprise anyone.

    It seems that the universe has rewarded me for putting principles over points because, last week, after I removed Kurt Zouma from my Fantasy Football team, my players did so well that I was able to climb from fourth place to third in our mini-league. And what a pity West Ham didn’t follow my example, because it’s all kicking off there (no pun intended).

    The RSPCA have taken Zouma’s cats away and he has been fined £250,000, which equates to two weeks’ wages for him. However, his teammates are now outraged to discover just how much he earns and are demanding more money. Furthermore, numerous sponsors have withdrawn their support from both the player and the club.

    Whilst we don’t find animal abuse the slightest bit funny, we can’t help but crack a wry smile at the fact that a not-especially-nice football club is being brought down by a cat. This is just the first step in the feline plan to take over the world, which might not happen overnight but it will happen.

    This is an old photo of Catorze, but I think the evil in his eyes perfectly sums up the feelings of all cats as they plan the next part of their uprising:

    “L’âge des hommes est terminé. Le temps des chats est arrivé.”

  • Hotel Diablo

    Cat Daddy and I are in Iceland at the moment, so we spent the last couple of days preparing for the arrival of Louis Catorze’s chat-sitteurs.

    We systematically have to remind all visitors that Catorze has a naughty habit of entering bedrooms and raising merry hell as people sleep, and this occasion was no exception. However, despite our advice to keep doors shut, it seems that some bizarre and twisted part of our guests finds his nocturnal visits entertaining. So they ignore us and, naturellement, Catorze takes advantage.

    Guests have been known to wake up to find their suitcases open and their stuff strewn all over the floor. And what makes it especially creepy is that Catorze does this utterly silently, slipping undetected into and out of the room, like a ghost. Imagine Paranormal Activity, The Sixth Sense and Poltergeist combined and you will have an idea of what it’s like. Sometimes he remains there, presiding arrogantly over his handiwork, as we discovered below.

    My mum carefully constructed a sort of Jenga-style tower using a cardboard box and her suitcase, with her next-day clothes neatly folded on top. This was how she found the smug little sod the next morning:

    For goodness’ sake.

    Another guest made the mistake of leaving her case open on the bed whilst we had dinner. This was the result:

    The Covid testing kits weren’t quite ready for THIS particular contagion.

    Guests who place towels on the bed are also not safe:

    A cat-hairy towel. Lovely.

    En conclusion: if you stay here, your stuff will be messed with. And, since Catorze is a trans-dimensional being who can teleport, we are all powerless to stop it.

    Come at your own risk.

  • La piqûre magique

    Oui, Mesdames et Messieurs, the answer to Wednesday’s French Wordle was this:

    Little Turdle.

    I know. I didn’t think proper nouns were allowed but, after some research, I have discovered that a louis is a type of sovereign coin. So I have learned something new.

    I have to give a special mention to my friend Ben for his attempt (even though I know my mum is going to read this):

    OH. MON. DIEU.

    Ben then proceeded to blame me for his naughtiness, saying it was my fault for insisting that he try French Wordle that day. Erm, ok, but that still doesn’t explain how he arrived at THAT starting word. I think this says far more about him than about me.

    In other news, earlier this week I had the joy of taking Louis Catorze to the vet for his steroid shot. The little sod fought like a demon when I shoved him into his transportation pod and screamed all the way there, startling the dogs in the park as we walked past them. This is by no means unusual but I don’t think I will ever truly get used to it.

    Luckily the practice was empty when we arrived, so it didn’t matter too much that the screaming continued. However, two ladies came in shortly afterwards to collect some medication, and they were hit by Catorze’s decibels as soon as they opened the door. Whilst waiting to be seen, they politely looked the other way and tried to pretend that they couldn’t hear the infernal racket.

    Because there was a complicated blood test cat being seen just before us, we had a longer wait than usual. Pretty soon the two ladies couldn’t stand Catorze’s noise anymore and had to start talking about something – ANYTHING – in an effort to mask it, and I even heard one of them say, “Isn’t the weather awful? When it’s like this, you just don’t feel like going out, do you?” (It was glorious sunshine outside at the time, so clearly the screaming had got to her so badly that she didn’t even know what she was saying.)

    Eventually, Complicated Blood Test Cat came out. She was deathly silent in her pod at first but soon decided, after hearing Catorze’s screaming, that she would join in. So, whilst her bill was being sorted out, the five of us (Complicated Blood Test Cat’s human, the two ladies-in-waiting, the receptionist and me) were subjected to a cacophony of feline screaming from both cats, in stereo.

    Because Catorze is due to have his next dental surgery later this month, he wasn’t able to have his usual steroid shot as it would prevent his wounds from healing. So, instead, he was given a fast-acting shot designed to last a week, and we are just going to have to try to keep him itch-free until after the surgery. And, since we don’t know what it is that triggers his scratching, this is going to prove somewhat tricky.

    So, for now, all I can do is keep blasting him with the atmosphere-purifying beeswax candles, brushing him regularly and hoping it doesn’t all turn to merde before his procedure.

    Here he is in his pod, just before we left for his appointment. You may wish to turn the volume down:

    Saint Jésus et tous ses apôtres.

  • Le mot du jour

    In my eight years of writing Le Blog, never have I ever posted twice in one day. So, if you are a regular follower, you will know that this is a TRÈS big deal indeed.

    If you’re into Wordle, please give the French equivalent, Le Mot, a go today. Even if you don’t think you know any French, please trust me and try it just for this one day. I promise you will not be disappointed.

    If you’re stuck, here’s a clue.